Nearly a year ago, I got an email from Liam Shen, who was interested in getting seriously involved in palaeontology. He asked for advice on doing a Ph.D part time, and I realised what what I had to say in reply might be of broader interest. Here’s Liam’s question, lightly edited: And my reply (which I did send to Liam the next day, but am only now getting around to posting here): I never set out to do a Ph.D really.

It’s now 22 years since Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote the classic document Cool URIs don’t change [1]. It’s core message is simple, and the title summarises it. Once an organization brings a URI into existence, it should keep it working forever. If the document at that URI moves, then the old URI should become a redirect to the new. This really is Web 101 — absolute basics.

Here’s an odd thing. Over and over again, when a researcher is mistreated by a journal or publisher, we see them telling their story but redacting the name of the journal or publisher involved. Here are a couple of recent examples.

It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why, but there are rumblings that he has been hit with a legal threat that he doesn’t want to defend. To get this out of the way: it’s always a bad thing when legal threats make information quietly disappear;

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As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written by their colleagues and donated to those publishers.

I started teaching fifteen years ago, as a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma in the spring of 1998. This document is a summary of everything I’ve learned about how students learn from then up until now. I’m setting it down in print because I found myself giving the same advice over and over again to students in one-on-one sessions—and at least for some of them, it’s made a difference. Here’s the summary.

I was astonished yesterday to read Understanding and addressing research misconduct, written by Linda Lavelle, Elsevier’s General Counsel, and apparently a specialist in publication ethics: So here (right in the first paragraph of Lavelle’s article) we see copyright infringement equated with plagiarism.

Robin Osborne, professor of ancient history at King’s College, Cambridge, had an article in the Guardian yesterday entitled “Why open access makes no sense”. It was described by Peter Coles as “a spectacularly insular and arrogant argument”, by Peter Webster as an “Amazingly wrong-headed piece” and  by Glyn Moody as “easily the most arrogant &

In a comment on an previous post, wycx articulated a position that sounds all too familiar: I have heard a lot of people say things like this in the last couple of months.  It makes pretty depressing reading.